Yepme

» see yepme.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

yepme was a television brand before it was anything i would have opened. for a few years in India you could not sit through an ad break without the name coming at you, cheap clothes at cheaper prices, a jingle built to lodge in your head. i was not in India, so none of it landed. i came to yepme the way i come to most of these, reading down a list of dead indian stores that meant nothing to me and a great deal to someone else.

it began in april 2011 as a plain online clothes shop. Vivek Gaur, who had helped build one of the India Today group's early shopping sites, set it up in Gurgaon with a couple of co-founders. within months they made the call that would define it, drop other people's labels and sell their own private brand, cutting out the middle so the prices could go low and stay low.

the money came in behind that idea. Helion backed it early, and by 2015 a growth round of seventy-five million dollars arrived, led by Khazanah, the malaysian sovereign fund. yepme had six million followers on Facebook and a claim on the part of the indian middle class that shopped by television as much as by browser. then it did the thing that killed a lot of these. it tried to be everywhere at once, an online store that also opened shops on the ground, and the spending went one way while the profit never followed.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

yepme spent like a company sure of winning. the television campaigns started in 2012 and nearly tripled its daily traffic, which is the kind of number that makes a founder open the taps. the money from Khazanah in 2015 was meant to fund the leap to the next level. some of it went into physical stores in Gurgaon and Noida, some into an attempt to sell yepme clothes in the United States through Amazon. none of it paid back the way the slides promised.

the problem was the room it was standing in. Flipkart and Myntra and the rest were raising and burning far more, buying the same shoppers with discounts a private-label brand could not match. a company whose whole pitch is being the cheapest cannot win a war fought entirely on price by people with deeper pockets.

~ the long tail ~

by 2017 the retreat was on. the physical shops closed for not making money, the warehouse moved somewhere smaller and cheaper, staff went out the door. in march 2018 yepme let go of around ninety percent of the people it had left and started winding down, owing wages, with some checks left to bounce.

for a while it had been one of the loudest brands on indian television, a name a whole country could recite and then, within a year or two, entirely forget. i never heard the jingle. from Ankara it was only ever a name on other people's screens, a store selling into a market i was never shopping in. it went silent for me the whole time, and then it went silent for everyone.

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